Exterminator
by NoxedSalvation
Summary: If you have to fight the Nazi Juggernaut with bugs, you may find yourself becoming an Inglorious Basterd.
1. Exterminator 1

Exterminator

1. 

A car pulled up, and another three guys got out and joined the crowd. I couldn't make out their faces in the glare of the front lights. Shortly after, the group – twenty or twenty five in total – started walking north, passing below me as they walked down the street.

I was out of time to consider my options. As much as I didn't want to face it, there was really only one option that I could have no regrets about.

I shut my eyes and focused on every bug on the neighbourhood, including the sizable swarm I had gathered on the way into the Docks. I took control of each of them.

Attack.

It was dark enough that I could only tell where the swarm was with my power. That meant I couldn't even tune out the swarm if I wanted to have any idea about what was going on. My brain was filled with horrendous amounts of information, as I sensed each bite, each sting.

As the thousands of insects and arachnids swarmed over and around the group, I could almost see the outlines of each person, just by sensing the shapes of the surfaces the bugs were crawling on, or the areas the vermin wasn't occupying.

My concentration was shattered when a few hundred bugs of all sorts simply disappeared, only to pop back into my power's range in the open air high above me.

Shit!

Oni Lee had been on site after all, and now I had to fight not only one impossibly strong parahuman, but a freaking teleporter too. I still controlled the insects which had gotten under Oni Lee's clothes though, so maybe all wasn't lost yet.

Inspiration struck and I directed the dozens of spiders hanging on to Oni Lee while he was falling back to earth to crawl in the direction of his face.

Blinding someone by injecting spider venom into their eyes was an extreme measure, but I had to get him out of the fight as fast as possible to concentrate on his even more dangerous boss.

It was too little too late - I felt him teleport again through my bugs, and this time he appeared on the roof beside me, just twenty feet away and blocking the fire escape. My spider attack squad had reached his face by now, but he was furiously wiping them away with his left hand while his right fumbled for something in his pockets.

Maybe he was going for a gun, maybe for something even more sinister, it didn't matter.

I had to act now and my power reached out to every flying insect of the swarm, ordering them into kamikaze attacks. I would pump up his hands with wasp and bee venom until he couldn't even put a finger on the trigger of a gun, but the bugs would need precious time to reach us up here.

Down in the street, a fireball erupted from Lung, and hundreds of my insects, many of whom I had just recalled to my aid, were burned to crisps, distracting me for a decisive second by falling out of my perception.

When I turned back to the foe at hand, I realised my mistake- Oni Lee had found what he was searching for and he didn't hesitate to use it. It was a grenade, shining ominously in the orange light of Lung's pyrokinetic eruption as he tossed it in my direction.

I threw myself backwards with all the leg strength I had built up through months of running, desperately hoping to get out of the blast zone. Then I was basked in white light and knew no more. 

I came back to consciousness a mess, wet from head to toes and shivering from an all encompassing cold. The ague was terrible, locking up all my muscles and making me a prisoner in my own body. I could see nothing but darkness and the only sounds besides the clattering of my teeth were irregular animal calls I couldn't identify.

I must've drifted back into a near coma, because the next time I opened my eyes, I was blinded by the intense rays of a summer sun standing above me. The shivers had fallen away, probably due to the warmth from the life spending orb in the sky.

I felt as if a train had hit me and when I remembered the actual events, I realized that the metaphor wasn't that far off, with Oni Lee's grenade and all. I concluded that I should be happy to still be alive and even without crippling wounds, as far as I could tell. I contemplated that thought lazily and quite happily, ignoring the irritating wetness still clinging to my costume, until the meaning of „sunshine" and „daylight" penetrated my still hazy thoughts.

Dad! He would be worried to death about me when he found my bed at home empty and not even a note from me about „leaving early" or something. I had to get back as soon as possible!

My body rejected any commands to rise up and jog home rather insistently though, going as far as giving me black spots in my field of view for my struggles. I fell back to the wet and spongy ground, exhausted and terrified by the thought of my dad calling in the cops to search for me.

How would I explain the costume, the mask? Could I deal with my dad and random police officers knowing that I was a parahuman? Would they expect me to join the Wards, throwing me from one cage - highschool - into another?

To distract myself from those wretched possibilities I couldn't do a thing about at the moment, I tried to focus on the here and now. Where exactly had I ended up following the explosion? And why was I still alive at all, after provoking two ruthless villains?

The answer to the first question might entail the one to the second, but I grasped that only much later, after I had fought back the shock I got when my still addled senses revealed the reality of my situation.

I found myself in a vast, stinking landscape of mud, grass, moss, stunted trees and ponds, with no hint of civilization in sight. No traffic noise, no contrails in the air, nothing.

It must've taken me more than a few minutes to fight back the utter confusion at the sight in front of my eyes, but before I managed it completely, thoughts of my dad, the cops and my utter helplessness returned, throwing me into another loop of anguish.

Tears streamed down my cheeks under the mask and my body shook with random but painful hiccups. Dad, the foul wasteland around me, my weakness, Lungs firestorm, the cops, a white hot flash, all formed a horrible kaleidoscope of emotions, impressions and shreds of rational thought that made me feel as if I was a pinned down insect on a wheel of fortune, spun by unimaginable forces.

Then, I threw up everything left in my stomach - luckily only bile, it could seep from my mask without suffocating me - and passed out for the third time in a day. 

There must be some truth to the proverb that „One gets used to everything", because the third time I awoke from a blackout, I stayed that way. My body felt frail, but the shivers hadn't returned and the sun was still up, although much less warmth reached the ground than before.

I sat upright with some difficulty, fought down the spinning motion my distorted sense of balance produced, and finally managed to stand up firmly, or at least as firmly as the soaked ground permitted. I had to get to my house, try to do some damage control, everything else was secondary.

But where to go? The area around me was so full of undergrowth, muddy ponds and other features strange to a city girl like me, that I couldn't make up my mind. While I turned around on the spot and pondered my options, a mosquito landed on the left lense of my mask and tried to jump its sucker into my eyeball.

I slapped it away reflexively, but it had given me an idea. I was a cape after all, maybe not with a very impressive power, but still. I stretched out my „sixth sense", and immediately uncountable tiny bulbs lit up in front of my „inner eye".

The number of invertebrates around was humongous. Nothing I had ever felt in Brockton Bay, even after gathering huge swarms for my cape work, could compare to this sensation.

There were literally millions of mosquitos in my range, and an unbelievable number of other bugs: Horseflies, bees, spiders, dragonflies, all kinds of beetles, wasps and hornets living off them, even some strange crustaceans under the murky water.

I struggled with mental overload for a moment, but my new multitasking abilities were up to the challenge, sorting the most useful bugs out, giving me a feel for their location relative to me and ignoring pointless things like earthworms and crabs.

My understanding of the environment improved by leaps and bounds, but my mood took the opposite direction. There was not a single sign of human habitation in the range of my power, no people, no houses, no cars, nothing artificial at all.

I was stranded in a huge tract of wilderness where Brockton Bay should be, and there was not even a hint which direction would lead me home or at least to the nearest village.

The part of me clinging to rationality as if it was a life belt started to analyse the data I'd gathered and came up with several scenarios that could explain my current situation. Maybe Oni Lee's weapon had just been a stun grenade and he deposited me in this miserable swamp to die? Or had I manifested another power in my moment of need, transporting me to the largest aggregation of insects within reach?

I speculated and hesitated for an eternity of torturous indecision, until I resolved that I simply had no choice but to start walking in the direction from which my swarms reported less water and more firm ground. This was a swamp after all, and I felt no desire to end up as an especially curious bog woman for future archaeologists.

Luckily, the summer heat - I decided to ignore the fact that it should be a cold January day in North America - must've dried the marches considerably, because I could traverse most areas without being sucked into bottomless mud.

From time to time I decided to take detours around especially ominous looking patches of so called „land", but I could hold to a surprisingly direct route. I utilised my bugs to prevent me from walking in circles, following straight chains of dragonflies I formed in front of me and stretching them out constantly to the limit of my power's range.

I had to take rests every few minutes, a combination of my general weakness, the difficult terrain and the emotional mess I was constantly battling down slowing me to a crawl. When the sun finally dipped behind the horizon, I hadn't hiked more than five miles, but felt as if I'd been on a forced march of thirty.

With the twilight came a feeling of being constantly watched, reminiscent of long forgotten childhood fears about monsters hiding under the bed. The tactile senses of my bugs showed no threat, nothing bigger than some pheasants and other swamp dwelling birds were near, but my uneasiness didn't go away.

I pushed on, grimly determined to use any last ray of light I could to get out of the mess I found myself in. Half an hour later, I regretted my thoughtlessness very much, when the solid surface I was walking on suddenly vanished and my next step threw me into a slimy pond of disgustingly smelling fluid.

It wasn't deep, the brackish water only coming to my shoulders, but I felt with bone deep fear how my feet were sinking into the mud on the bottom. As if the earth itself wanted to suck me in.

Maybe I would've drowned there in my exhausted state and wearing my armoured costume, never to be heard about again, but my flailing arms caught hold of the solid branch of a bush that protruded over the edge of the water.

I struggled, my heart pounding rapidly, trying to keep my nose above the water line. An adrenaline rush gave me additional power and I started to simultaneously push into the mud enclosing my feet and to pull on the lifesaving plant.

The hold on my feet lessened and with the most powerful pull I could manage, I got myself onto save ground again.

I lay in the dirt, spent beyond anything I'd ever experienced. It took long minutes until I could drag myself a few feet away from that damned hellhole, roll myself into an embryonic position to preserve body heat, and fall into an uneasy sleep. 

My empty stomach woke me up. It was growling like an angry bear and for a few moments, I imagined how I would feed it with a nice cheese sandwich and bacon while dad was drinking his coffee. With that thought of my father, reality caught up with me.

When I opened my eyes, I found that I was still lost in an unknown and much too boggy part of the world, without any idea how I came here and where I could find the nearest outposts of civilization. With the light of day, the horrible anxiety I'd felt yesterday returned in full force.

I was a useless „hero", a loser who had botched her first fight. For a moment, I thought I could almost hear snickers and whispers, Emma and her friends gossiping about stupid Hebert, who thought she could play hero, but would only drive her father into an early grave, as she'd done with her mom. I shook my head to get rid of such self- defeating fantasies.

Still, I had no doubt that dad would be out of his mind with worry by now, he would surely have called the police and given a missing person report. Maybe he had already mobilised his friends in the union to tape search posters on street lamps with my bony face on them.

My eyes teared up again, but I forced the guilt, fear and hopelessness back. I couldn't dwell on such feelings if I wanted to get out of here. It was no use. If I wanted to survive this swamp, which had nearly killed me already only hours ago, I had to concentrate on the practical side of things.

Like food. After three months of intense running, I had no fat reserves left on me and I didn't carry any eatable – or otherwise useful – items in my costume.

If I didn't get enough calories into my still weakened system, I would only get worse until my body went into lock down and I died a horrible death out here. What could I do to prevent that? I started to list options, every new idea less palatable than the last one.

I could try to find eatable berries or mushrooms, sure. But how did I know they were actually not poisonous to humans? Trial and error might end deadly.

Or I could simply use my powers and hunt a few birds... only to pluck and butcher them with my bare hands and eat their raw meat? Or even find the species of bugs that tasted best uncooked? I shuddered.

Finally, I decided that I should take a look at the crabs which were living in the ponds of this trice damned swamp. I'd remembered from a TV show that raw seafood was a delicacy in parts of the world, especially Japan. Maybe I could bring myself to kill and eat crabs?

When a small group of the animals followed my command and marched up to me for inspection, I gave up the thought. They looked disgusting, with mud everywhere on their tiny bodies and not enough meat to actually bother. It might well be better to go hungry today in the hope that I would find other people in the next 12 hours. Yes, that would surely be better than cracking crab armor and picking out the flesh.

Water was another, even more pressing problem. My throat was parched and I felt an intense thirst, even stronger than on that one occasion in my early running days, when I'd forgotten to hydrate myself beforehand.

Looking at the swamp water in the nearest ponds, I had the terrible thought that I would have to drink this stuff before long. Not only disgusting to look at, but guaranteed to be full of germs and parasites. The only alternative to imbibing that was to find flowing water in time.

I started todays hike without further ado.

Finally some luck! After three or four hours of walking and wading through the seemingly endless swamp, I stuck gold in the form of a small river, maybe a dozen feet wide, that was meandering across my way. The water wasn't moving fast, but the current was visible and the water less murky than that of the ponds. I didn't hesitate to drink from it, using the useless paper from the small block I carried in my costume as an impromptu filter against suspended matters

I drank my fill and felt much better, at least until I realised that I had nothing to carry the relatively clean water with me. Maybe it would be prudent to change my direction for the first time since I began my hike and follow the little stream, instead of crossing it? Who knew how long it would take to find another source of (barely) drinkable water?

I was sitting on the riverbank, resting in the shade of a stunted birch tree, and tried to make up my mind, when a deep humming sound entered my consciousness. I stood up, closed my eyes and threw my focussed perception into my power, but the insects around me weren't encountering anything unusual.

The sound grew louder, until I suddenly knew what it must be- a massive airscrew plane had to be flying in my direction. I hadn't identified it at first because those planes were very rare today and their noise was unfamiliar. Elation and hope surged through me- if I could somehow get the pilot's attention, I was as good as saved.

Stepping out of the birch's shadow, I faced the direction from which the engine sounds approached. Nervous energy flooded my whole body. I simply had to make them see me, and my powers were the best bet to achieve that, regardless of problems that might arise from being outed as a parahuman.

I clenched my teeth, closed my eyes once again and called upon every flying insect in a radius of 200 feet. They rose from the ground, the swamp water, the undergrowth, first thousands, than hundreds of thousands, finally more than a million bugs of all species.

I formed them into three titanic spherical swarms and had the individual insects fly close together, to make the mass as opaque as the globes of living chitin had formed, I ordered them to rise into the air above me, stopping them at a height of about 300 feet.

It took all my concentration to control so many bugs in such a precise way, but I somehow managed and started the next stage of my plan: Let the balls, with a diameter of more than 20 feet each, dance around each other in a complicated pattern that had nothing in common with the usual ways insects moved. Yes, that should do the trick.

I didn't have to wait long until I could see the plane in the distance, speeding towards me with droning motors. On the current route, it would pass maybe a mile to my right. It looked quite peculiar, with a very short hull which was reflecting the sunlight from dozens of windows and hung suspended between two long nacelles, that ran backwards and formed a rectangle with the elevator.

I instructed my swarms to dance even more energetically around each other, providing a bizarre spectacle that looked as unnatural as I could make it.

If the pilot missed this, he should be fired for incompetence, I thought.

He didn't.

The plane changed course and dived down, until it was flying as low as 600 feet when it passed overhead.

From this distance, the huge, white coloured swastikas on the wings were impossible to miss. 


	2. Exterminator 2

AN: Yeah, here is the second chapter of "Exterminator". Have fun and remember- Worm belongs to Wildbow, I'm just using his creation without any intend to make money.

2.

„What the heck is going on?" was the first coherent thought that shot through me as soon as I recovered from the utter outrage and disbelieve that the Nazi emblems on the plane had produced.

I turned around to keep the strange craft in my sight as the range to it grew, and tried to formulate a hypothesis, any idea really, what this meant. Maybe my still unexplained transportation to the swamp had left me in the middle of a historical re-enactment?

Or, more plausible with my current luck, I had stumbled into the personal playing field of the Empire 88. A shiver ran down my spine despite the warm morning and I started to summon more bugs to me from further afield than before, while I ordered the three huge swarms high above me to stop their now useless dancing and come back to the ground.

I had already half convinced myself that Kaiser or one of his henchmen was sitting in the departing plane's pilot seat, when it reached a distance of about a mile and went into a sudden, very tight and therefore quick turn back to my position.

At the same time, it started to dive even deeper than before and my view of it was blocked by the intense reflection of light from the cockpit windows.

Everything about my displacement into this bog felt wrong and surreal, but swastikas on an aggressively flying vintage plane went a step further and made the hairs on my neck rise up.

Flight or fight reflexes set in, but I fought them down while I wrecked my brain how to react to this as of yet merely potential threat. After all, I couldn't just attack the plane with my bugs while it was still possible that some wacky rich lawyer-cum-wargamer was flying it.

A sound I had until that moment only heard while watching TV broke through the humming of the airscrews.

„BRATATAT!"

I had half a terrified second to stare at the bog water that fountained into the air mere feet in front of me, then my breastplate was hit by an giant hammer and I was thrown backwards into the mud.

Pain like I'd never felt before stabbed into my chest, driving tears into my eyes and deadly terror into my heart. I could … not … breathe.

I tried to roll towards the river, but my confused, adrenaline fueled efforts only resulted in flopping around like a fish on dry land in the slippery muck.

My panic rose to a fever pitch when I realized that my lungs kept refusing to inhale fresh oxygen, suffocating me. Animal instincts sprang up and I crawled towards the river on all fours, hoping against hope that I could disappear in the water.

„BRATATAT"

That fucking asshole was still shooting at me!

There were no more strikes like the first devastating one, but I felt fifteen bullets which produced very hot channels of displaced air passing just yards behind me, before smashing into the dirt.

My lungs burned like fire, my ribs throbbed terribly and I was sure that I wouldn't make it to the stream.

I was going to be murdered here, in this godforsaken quagmire, shot down like a duck by someone I hadn't even seen face to face and never harmed in any way. Dad would be devastated if he ever learned about my inglorious end...

Wait- how had I known about the number of slugs and the change in air temperature their passage left behind?

My bugs!

Somehow, while I was reeling from getting hit by a plane- mounted weapon, the swarms had reacted, swirling around me and shielding me from view.

Upon realising this, I felt my power swell rapidly inside my head until it „clicked" in an as of now unknown pattern - and without any conscious effort, four human shaped swarms sprang into being and left the irregular formation that centered on me, moving away swiftly in all compass directions.

„BRATATAT"

„BRATATAT"

The gunner poured out longer sheaves of fire now, obviously confused by my swarms and trying to make up for the uncertainty of his target with large quantities of ammunition.

For now, the bullets rained down on the two clones moving perpendicularly away from the planes' flight path – and, luckily, from me.

After another torturous and seemingly never ending span of moments, I found myself on the bank of the river, with spasming lungs and spots in front of my eyes. I had only seconds left before I lost consciousness!

With a last effort, I managed to slip into the water between two thick bushes overhanging the bank, finally getting some cover other than the very conspicuous swarm still hovering above me.

My fingers fumbled as I tried to weave some of the bushes' elastic branches around the straps of my mask, to keep my head over water when I passed out. I did the same to the piece of armor protecting my left elbow so I didn't drift away in the very weak current.

Sluggishly, I pressed my right hand to my chest and tried to massage the area over my solarplexus, but the chestplate that had saved my live just a minute before hindered my efforts.

I felt unconsciousness rushing towards me, and with my last thoughts, I directed a few hundred spiders in the vicinity to secure my improvised hold on the bushes with their silk, while the rest of the amorphous cloud of insects was ordered to slowly move downriver, as if following the current. After that, darkness claimed me.

Falling unconscious all the time really sucks, especially when you aspire to be a hero, but a bullet to the solarplexus might excuse my nearly dickensian proneness to „faint" in this case.

When I came back to myself with a start, I found my body softly swinging in the river current and quickly learned that I was unable to move my head or my left arm.

Obviously, my spiders had followed their orders even after I passed out - a feat I hadn't managed before - because my left arm and the branches woven through my mask straps had been mummified with spider webbing, securing me from being carried away and/or drown.

Before I got myself free of my impromptu „cocoon", I focused all my senses to detect the madmen who had tried to kill me, but after a minute, I hadn't been able to see or hear the plane, and the bugs in my range didn't detect anything unusual.

I relaxed a fraction and had the small army of spiders that was still hanging around in the two life- saving bushes – feeding on themselves – come back to me and start to dissolve their work.

While my minions were busy, I distracted myself by trying to puzzle out the newest insane facet of my very involuntary „swamp adventure", but didn't get anywhere. Without knowing who the pilot and crew were, I could only speculate and come up with increasingly unlikely explanations.

It occurred to me that the swastika was not only the symbol of Nazism, but also a religious sign in Buddhism, as I had learned from my mom when I was about ten, following a rather embarrassing incident involving a waiter at a Chinese restaurant and a swastika adorned bronze Buddha.

But would a bunch of nihilistic gangsters like the ABB use swastikas while they were engaged in fighting the Empire88, who used the same markings? That sounded like a recipe for disaster to me.

I concentrated back on the here and now when I felt my bugs cut through the last threads of silk binding me. I still had to leave the bog behind ASAP, now with the added complication of air raids and possibly other hostile activity.

I began to haul myself back to what constituted „land" in this environment, but was stopped cold by terrible pain stabbing into my chest where I'd been hit. I clung to the branches desperately, fighting back tears and afraid to move.

When the torment in my ribcage finally abated, I tried to use only the muscles in my arms to pull myself from the water, so that I could go easy on the areas most affected by the kinetic energy of the bullet.

I had some false starts and further attacks of horrible agony, but finally I got my body back to the bank of the river. This normally insignificant task had exhausted my so much that I didn't try to move further for a long time, just lying there in the rays of the descending sun.

It would be dusk soon and I would need to survive another wet and clammy night in the quagmire from hell. Better to search for a somewhat sheltered area now, one where I wouldn't run the danger to roll into the river in my assuredly restless sleep.

I tried to sit up, but my injury had other ideas and pierced my whole chest with pain, making me scream out loud. When I was able to form coherent thought again, I realized that I was going nowhere in my current condition. I would be lucky if the affected rips weren't broken in a dozen places.

"Damn, if I can't even stand up now, I won't be able to walk another mile tomorrow, not to mention get out of this place!" I thought with rising dread. And if I couldn't get out, I would still end up dead.

No, this would not happen, I wouldn't allow it.

There had to be a way to get to safety and I would find it- but not now. Spent and wounded as I were, I needed rest more than anything else. Closing my eyes, I ordered my army of spiders to secure me to the ground of the riverbank, did a last check of the landscape around me via my other bugs, found nothing dangerous, and let myself drift into sleep.

As I had predicted, my sleep was interrupted many times by the uncomfortable conditions of the swamp and the dull aching of my ribcage, but when I woke up at sunrise, I felt at least somewhat better.

While my spiders dismantled the silk lines that had prevented me from becoming fish food, I fought to get the growing pangs of hunger and the aftereffects of being shot from my mind and concentrate on a solution that would save my live.

I pondered several options, from staying put and eating bugs to crawling through the bog in short legs, but they were all unbearable and unlikely to be successful. When my body was free of its security web again, I had another go at sitting up, but was met with the same result of excruciating suffering.

No, moving under my own power was impossible and my bugs, even in in huge swarms, weren't able to lift me even a few inches.

But wait… lifting up? There was a river right in front of me! If I used the current, I could actually do what I had feared yesterday - drift on the water. The only problems with that plan were the facts that I couldn't move for shit, was still weak and didn't know a thing about conditions downriver, like rapids, falls or dangerous human construction.

Entrusting myself to the stream would be an enormous risk, that was a sure thing, but maybe I could mitigate it at least a bit by using my powers. After all, my costume had stopped a slug from what was most likely a heavy machine gun, why not try my hand at another bug made item?

I thought about what I needed, made up a basic concept and got started. There was no time to waste.

I expanded my awareness, took control of several hundred swamp crabs around me and directed them to come out of the water. At the same time, I gathered more and more spiders of all species to my location, until thousands of them surrounded me.

Following my orders, groups of crabs started to attack bushes, sizeable weeds and tree saplings with their scissors, cutting them down and towing the pieces in my direction.

I had them lay out the thickest and straightest pieces of green wood in a parallel pattern on a flat area of the riverbank, mere feet from the water. When the base of my construct was about six feet long and three wide, I set the crabs to add another layer crosswise.

Now the spiders came into play - I used them to weave the two layers of wood and other durable plant matter together, while I sent the crabs out to do another round of micro- lumbering.

I repeated the process several more times and had the crabs tighten the integrity by knotting branches together until I was satisfied that my new "raft" had enough mass and solidity to keep me afloat.

It was a hack job, rough and ugly to look at, but I hoped it was good enough to carry me out of the marches.

The last mission of my crabs was to find me a long stick that I could use to stay in the middle of the river and get obstacles out of the way.

The sun had risen to its apex before the crustaceans had felled a sapling that fulfilled my needs, cut off all branches and hauled it to my float. Launching the raft and getting on the product of my labor proved to be a stretched out and utterly torturous process, mostly because I had severely underestimated its weight.

After two hours of agonizingly slow and embarrassing fumbling around, including crawling and crying like a baby, I was finally able to push off the riverbank with my staff and start what I called "invalid rafting adventure" in a fit of gallows humor.

The raft stayed afloat reasonably well and even kept me somewhat dry. I drifted downriver undisturbed for a long time, the current staying slow and sedate. The landscape hadn't changed much, but then, I didn't make more than three or four miles per hour.

I used my powers to keep a lookout in every direction and kept a small but potent swarm of wasps and hornets close to me so that I could react rapidly to threats on the ground.

I also formed huge clouds of mosquitos and flies on several fixed points around me, dissolving them when they dropped out of my range and building up new ones immediately. I wouldn't be surprised in the open by a hostile plane a second time.

More time passed and after five or six hours, I noticed that more and larger trees grew on the banks, hopefully indicating that the marchland started to give way to firmer ground around me. Shortly after my attention was sharpened by this observation, I found the first signs of human habitation in the form of fences corralling lush grazing land.

When I spotted barns and dirt tracks, I sighed in bone deep relief - it had been the right decision to confide myself to the river, I could never have walked the twenty miles or more I had traveled on the water to reach this place.

Only minutes later, I came into control of an impressively large group of insects that had gathered of their own volition, attracted by several large buildings full of pigs and cattle. I had discovered an occupied farmstead and hence the first ground bound humans since I arrived in the swamp.

And to my intense pleasure and comfort, it was only a hundred feet away from the river, obviously depending on it as a source of water for the animals. Without delay, I started to steer my float to the right riverbank, angling to land at the point from which I had to cross the shortest distance to the farm.

When the houses came into view my happiness got knocked down several steps – sure, this was an inhabited farm, with at least five people inside as I sensed through my bugs, but it looked nothing like the ones I knew from TV.

Most of the buildings were old and in poor repair, the roof ridges hanging through as if under a great weight and there was no machinery or other modern equipment in sight.

Well, regardless of their economic standing, here lived people who could help me, who would surely feed a wounded parahuman and get me in contact with my dad or at least some local authorities. I was as good as rescued from my ordeal!

I landed safely next to a small pier that had a boat tied to it, letting out a breath of relief as I crawled back onto firm ground. Mobilizing my reserves, I started to drag myself in the direction of the houses.

I'd considered to use bugs to get the attention of the people inside the farm, but had decided that I didn't want to frighten them with my rather creepy power if I could help it.

The same went for shouting loud enough to reach them in the farm. That would only scare them and make them wary before they got a good look at me.

When I had crawled about 50 feet, roughly half the distance, I had to pause due to the constant pain the movement produced in my ribcage. Luckily, a huge lime tree stood next to me and I crawled the few feet over to rest against it in the long shadow of the mild evening.

Twenty or thirty minutes passed while I recovered. I was just preparing to take the last leg of my awful journey, when my power alarmed me to unusual movement on the brink of my range.

I concentrated and discovered that a group of a dozen riders were coming in my direction, the smell of their horses luring scores of flies and other insects to them and giving me a very good "view" of them.

Their clothes were of the same cut, they wore iron helmets on their heads and every single one had a long contraption of iron and wood strapped over their shoulder, most likely guns.

The hairs on my neck rose up as the logical conclusion of my surveillance hit me like a ton of bricks – these were soldiers or maybe a band of bandits, and they were coming down the dirt track that led only to one destination- the farmstead before me!

There was no chance to get back to the river before they reached the farm, I realized with rising fear and anger. Why the fuck did those strange guys with guns come to this of all places at the same time I was hoping to get rescued by its residents?

I summoned my "contingency"- swarm from the riverbank and hid it in the crown of the lime, while I gathered more swarms around the house, holding them in reserve. If this situation developed as I suspected and feared, I would need them.

Having done everything I could to get ready, I focused back on the riders, who were about 200 yards away by now. If they were really wearing uniforms, I reasoned, I may be able to identify them by their national emblems or other symbols. I send a group of horseflies to explore the uniform of the soldier in front, probably their leader, and let them move over his shoulders and collar.

Then I froze and a deep dread rose up within me. There were indeed signs on this soldiers' collar – my bugs had crawled over them and sensed their slightly elevated form. I knew them all too well, they were known around the world as an universal symbol of evil: SS.


End file.
